>> you're watching 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books on c-span2's booktv. >> here's a look at some upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country.

>> please let us know about book fairs and festivals in your area, and we'll add them to our list. e-mail us at booktv@c-span.org. >> back to ten things congress doesn't want you to know about how it does business. number four, powerful members of congress in safe, noncompetitive seats often hold fundraisers outside their districts to increase their leverage over other members. number five, congress spends more than $100 billion every year on well over 200 programs that are not authorized by law. and number six, congress routinely raids the social security trust fund to cover

general revenue shortfalls. >> guest: well, if you look at the appropriation bills which have not been done the last two years because of the political dynamic that's going on and you go in and say we're appropriating x amount of money and then you look at how many programs -- it's actually up to over $350 billion now -- of programs that are funded that are not authorized by the congress, which tells you that there's an imbalance in congress is how do we appropriate funds for a program that we haven't said we should be spending money on? and it tells you the power of the appropriation committees and the power of pork or benefit going back to the states of what's most important. is it most important to actually look good in oklahoma by the amount of money that i can direct there? or is it more important to think in the long term what's, what's the health of our country going to be in the long run and how do

we make those tough decisions? and politically it puts you on the losing side of every argument based on the force up here. but you have to work hard to explain yourself in your state. >> host: number seven, members of congress frequently do not have the opportunity to read the bills they are voting on. number eight, one of the more secret and anti-democratic ways in which congress spends is directing money in report language that only members of the committee can vote on or amend. number nine, each year congress spends countless hours preparing and debating a budget resolution it has no intention of keeping. and finally, number ten, congress circumvents its own budget limits and avoids public scrutiny by exploiting its own arcane budget procedures. >> yeah. those are all true. >> host: the budget resolution, we're about the to begin that

season -- about to begin that season in february. is it a waste of time? >> guest: no. if -- look, right now we have a $3.65 trillion spending. l the big criticism of the last two years is congress is gridlocked. oh, really? how'd we authorize spending $3.65 trillion? what we're gridlocked in is spending money that we don't have on things that are not absolutely necessary. that's what we're gridlocked over. and we're gridlocks -- gridlocked over that so that we can make ourselves look good to our constituencies. so there's no gridlock when it comes to spending your kids' future in washington. we wouldn't have spent $3.6 trillion if we'd have had a budget last year. but we did a continuing resolution that passed which means it's bipartisan, passed a republican house and a democratic senate, and the

president signed it, and yet we borrowed $1.2 trillion that we didn't have of which i would contend 600 billion of it was wasted. was literally did no benefit directly for the citizens of this country other than those that took the money to administer or develop or give out the program. so, you know, in a wand you could look, with a wand and just say every program actually stand up that's effective and efficient. and what you'd see is minimal. and the reason that that's so is that members of congress haven't oversighted, members of congress haven't done their job. they turn a blind eye and say it's hard to oversight, and besides, i'm going to get criticism when i do. so, therefore, let it go. so it goes back. now we're, now in that cr last year $350 billion worth of

programs were appropriated money that have either never been authorized by congress, or the authorization has lapsed. so it means the authorizing committees in congress aren't working. because if we're going to appropriate money whether it's authorized or not, why not just have an authorizing appropriating committee and put 'em all into one? so we totally ignore our own rules. >> host: how much fear is there in members of congress? of their constituents, of criticism, of not being reelected? >> guest: well, i think it runs the gamut. but i think you need to look at maybe a larger perspective. you know, i was a businessman long before i was a physician, built a business. i became a physician as an older individual. i was known as grandpa in my medical school class and

practiced for 25 years. few goal was to be a physician -- my goal was to be a physician. i wasn't at the risk of my populace other than my reputation with my physicians. -- my patients. so if you put it in context, it depends on what the goal of a house member of the house of representatives or a senator is. if the goal is to fix the problems in the country, to create a at least as good a future for the next generations that follow us as we've had and if that goal is above your perm perm -- your personal goal of getting an office that has notoriety and power, then you're going to do find because you're going to keep that perspective. when you -- your number one goal is the position or the notoriety and the secondary goal which helped you get to that goal is

to secure the future, what happens is, is how you value your position on certain policies changes. that's not impure, that's not terrible, that's just human nature. so i make the point in "the debt bomb" is if you're ever going to solve this problem, if we're ever going to secure our liberty and the freedoms for our kids and grandkids, gotta quit sending career politicians here. >> host: senator coburn, what -- did you get any hostile reaction from your colleagues from "the debt bomb" or "breach of trust"? >> guest: no. i did some on "breach of trust." i don't think many of my colleagues have read "the debt bomb." but i'm pretty honest. i make speeches in the caucus and on the floor.

i'm okay to take the consternation and criticism of my colleagues if i actually think our country's in trouble, and it is in trouble. you know, we're bankrupt. you know, there's a great article. if you take generally-accepted accounting principles, the same thing c-span has to operate under, the same thing every other business has to operate, most county government operate under, we right now have $88 trillion of things we're going to have to pay for we have no idea where we're going to get the money over the next 75 years. $88 trillion. you know, that's about 1.05 trillion more in bills coming due than what we have over the next 75 years. if you didn't grow the government or the economy at all why have we put ourself in that position? and so the fact is we're now, the federal reserve has increased its balance sheet. of in other words, it's created

$2 trillion worth of funny money. they printed $2 trillion worth of money and, ultimately, the pain of that is going to fall on the middle class and the very poor in this country. and it's going the defeat what both parties say they want. and yet we don't have the courage today to make the tough choices even if it means we lose our seats to secure the future for this country. we put ourselves first instead of the country first. it is not hard. if -- any american citizen if they read "back in black," they can go to our web site and read it, there's a lot of common sense ways to save money in there. just this last week the air force announced, this is a great example. in the federal government this year we're going to spend $64 billion on i.t. projects. that's $64 billion. the gao says at least half of

that will be wasted. in other words, it'll never get completed, it's never do what it's supposed to do. in "back in black" we had a program in the air force that we said you ought to cancel. we said this two years ago. you ought to cancel this, because it's never going to work, all right? hoors how inefficient government is. this last week the air force canceled it, finally. they spent another $100 million on it before they canceled it. they paid a settlement fee to cancel it of $8 million, but two things didn't happen. the perp that was responsible -- the person that was responsible for that contract didn't get fired and wasn't held accountable, and the company that didn't provide the service didn't get sued to get our money back, the taxpayers of this country. nobody runs their household that way. most state governments don't operate that way. but we are totally incompetent when it comes to spending

america's taxpayers' money. so why would we continue to waste $32 billion a year on i.t. programs that don't work for the federal government? you know, that's 60% of what they want to take additionally out of the pentagon. and that's government wide. so why would we do that? where's the leadership in the congress to say we're going to get this stopped? we're going to have a special subcommittee look at this, oversight it, look at the bad actors, look at the bad actors in government, and we're going to napped -- to demand the people who make those decisions get fired and the companies who are not performing pay the money back. none of that happens. so you can defraud the federal government, you cannot perform on a contract, and you can do it with impunity. and that's because members of congress are basically not willing or inexperienced to not know that you ought to be able to hold people accountable for what they say they're going to do. whether it's a federal employee,

a procurement employee or the company that's providing that. and that's just one example that happened this week. >> host: senator coburn, what was the business you built before you went to medical school? >> guest: my father had started a machinery manufacturing business for op thalamic products, and i started an op thalamic lens, plastic lens, glass lens and interocular lens division of that. and i did that, actually, in southern virginia. i lived up here for ten years from 2000 -- from 19, behalves behalves -- what was it, summer of '69 to 2008. >> host: does that company still exist? >> guest: portions of it still exist. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> the first ladies that i am drawn to are the ones on the ground floor, the sort of more modern-day first ladies are the ones that i can identify with more, people like eleanor

roosevelt, jackie kennedy, you know? those are the women whose stories feel close enough to connect with. many of the women in the higher floors, on the state floor, they seem like characters from a wonderful story because it was such a long time ago. it's history, and you read about it in books. to be in their presence seems a little disconnected. but the first ladies on the ground floor are the ones that i remember, i remember their real stories and their real -- i can picture their lives in an incredible way that makes me think about their challenges and struggles and how they used the space. >> the first ladies, their private and public lives. c-span's teaming up with the white house historical association for a first of its

kind original series for television. first ladies: influence and image. airing over two seasons. season one begins presidents day at 9 p.m. eastern and pacific on c-span, c-span radio and c-span.org. >> next on booktv, peter bergen and a panel of contributors discuss the book "talibanistan" which explores the threat posed by extremists who operate between afghanistan and pakistan. this is about an hour and a half. [inaudible conversations] >> well, good afternoon, everybody, and welcome. i'm steve coll, i'm the president of the new america foundation, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this event briefly. and to introduce our subject which from our perspective involves the launch of a book

that somebody will hold up for the audience since i don't have a copy. talibanistan. laugh -- [laughter] and i just wanted to say a few words about where this book came from and why the subject matter that you'll hear discussed today struck us as or worthy of what became really a couple of years of endeavor at new america led by peter bergen who will be your moderator through most of the program today. peter and katherine teedman, who unfortunately is not with us today, co-edited this book. it's a collection of scholarly and journalistic articles about the taliban and it environment in southern afghanistan and western pakistan. and it was born as an attempt at new america by a diverse group of researchers to try to get at some of the diversity of the taliban itself at a time when

the united states was really puzzling over its resurgence as a movement, as a political force in afghanistan, as a military challenge, and really a challenge that had been neglected in the years after the 2001 defeat of the islamic emirates of afghanistan in which revived and presented itself as a really grave dilemma to the obama administration as it arrived in 2009. and so our effort was to do what think tanks do which is just to try to provide some ground truth and some complexity and granularity about this phenomenon, recognizing that the sort of clicheed iml imagine of a one-eyed mullah and his band of devoted and intractable fanatics was inadequate and really a falsifying of the problem. so the purpose was not to prosecute a particular view of the taliban, but just to start to document some sections of its diversity and some aspects of

its character that were otherwise, um, not part of american debate or discourse. so i'm really, really proud of this book and of peter particularly whose leadership of the national security studies program at new america over the last five years has been one of my joys in my office just to support him and to watch him. and katherine as well who worked very, very hard. the last thing i want to say is that this book and the ideas and the research in it is really parking lot of a much -- part of a much broader body of work about south asia that we've been engaged in here over the last five years, the afpak channel. i hope many of you are subscribers and readers which we've carried out in collaboration with foreign policy and lots of other conferences and publications around south asian affairs. so anyway, we're all very pleased to have this occasion to bring us together, and the

purpose today is to have a very serious discussion about the ideas and subjects that are in the book and that are, obviously, still alive as dilemmas for american foreign policy. so let me introduce peter and welcome him to the podium. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, steve, and thank you for all of you coming today and for c-span for covering this. steve was instrumental in making this whole project happen, so i'm very grateful to him. thank you, also, to oxford university press which published the book and did, i think, a fine job in terms of presenting the material. thank you, also, to my co-editor, katherine, and thanks also to people here at the foundation, brian fishman, patrick doherty, jennifer roland and andrew lev witch who were also involved in making the book possible. as steve indicated, the reason we felt this project was necessary -- initially, it was a series of papers -- was not

since the rouge stormed on the world stage out of the woods of cambodia in the 1970s had an insurgent movement become so important yet at the same time so less well understood than any other ip sur gent movement in the modern era. and, um, you know, obviously, we had the great book on the taliban, but it seemed that that was very much the pre-9/11 taliban, and we wanted to focus on how did the taliban develop after 9/11. we have some dozen chapters in the book, six people here on the stage who contributed to the book. a fellow here at the new america foundation who's writing a book on afghanistan has the first chapter in the book and really that chapter, which he'll explain in more detail, asks the question is, in a sense, was the taliban p insurgency inevitable particularly at his relates to the kandahar ri taliban immediately after 9/11?

were there efforts by that movement to, essentially, negotiate with the afghan government which, unfortunately, were not followed up on? um, we also have on the stage hassan abbas, former high ranking pakistani police official who really examines what is now the political scene and what was in a sense the political ecosystem in which the pakistani taliban is able to swim. because while groups like the mma are not the taliban, they're certainly sufficiently aligned with the taliban to allow it the political space that it enjoyed in the 2008-2009 time period when there was quite a lot of denial about the pakistani taliban and the threat that it really posed to the pakistani state. next is brian fishman. brian is a fellow here at new america foundation, he also works at a company with which many of you are familiar.

brian worked on two chapters, also one really looking at the haqqani network in some detail. pretty sure probably the only person who's met the de facto leader of the haqqani network. brian also worked with him on that chanter and also did a very interesting chapter where he kind of stepped back and looked at, in a sense, the topology of all the different taliban groups and asked certain questions; do they attack the pakistani state or not, do they attack u.s./nato forces in afghanistan or not, do they take direction from mullah omar or not? and a very interesting way of capturing the topology of the different taliban groups. to brian's right is ken ballen who's one of the leading pollsters in the muslim world. he helped us with a poll, the first poll that really looked at the political, sensitive political questions in the federally-administered tribal regions. obviously, polling is pretty tricky for all sorts of obvious

reasons. we had a very good partner on the ground called camp. ken helped us really think about how to make this poll a truly scientific poll. he will explain some of the findings of that poll. he'll also, he's written a book "terrorists in love," which is a almost anthropological account of jihadis and why they join certain groups, and he'll also talk a little bit about what he learned about mullah omar in the process of writing that book. to the right of ken ballen is colonel tomlin. who served on admiral mullen's staff. he has written, i think, an absolutely fascinating chapter essentially on the strategic defeat of al-qaeda and what that means and what the united states should do about it going forward in afghanistan. of course, this is not necessarily a popular view among certain circles in washington, d.c., for instance, who want to say somehow the attack in benghazi is proof of an al-qaeda resurgence. i think colonel lynch will deal

with that in his remarks. and finally, samir is a ph.d. candidate at mit, and he has a very interesting chapter in the book about pakistan counterinsurgency operations which have actually been, i think, quite effective. we've had our own problems with counterinsurgency in afghanistan. arguably, the pakistani military did a better job than we've done in most of afghanistan. so with that, i'll turn it over. we'll just go down the row the this way. we'll start with hasan abbas. >> thank you very much, peter, first and foremost. i want to congratulate you on the work and the great work on militancy in south asia. it's really a great contribution and a great source for research for students, um, everywhere. not only in the u.s., but also in south asia. i just actually returned from

pakistan about 48 hours ago. i was just joking with a friend that out of my three days in pakistan, about two and a half days were spent on, um, discussing new phenomena, a religious player who had just gone pack to pakistan. and this has become in recent months kind of a new phenomena. many major political leaders holding big rallies, um, with hundreds of thousands of people coming up with new agendas, coming up with new slogans and now with elections coming in three months or so, there's a lot of political activity. but i'll focus in many about the remaining seven minutes that i am given on not this frontier province. and i also wallet to add given -- want to add given my position in a government organization all that i'm saying today are my personal views and not representative of ndu or dud. the landscape, the political

landscape in what was called the northwest frontier province, that's what i focused on. this is the settled area of pashtuns. we often focus on the unsettled area of pashtuns which is federally-administered tribal area between pack tan and afghanistan with about six or seven million people. but we often forget to look at the ajoining or adjacent settled area which the british had framed it like that which is about 25 districts, 20 million people, perhaps a bit more than all the pashtuns together in afghanistan. so this is very critical. this is the connection between fatah and the rest of the mainstream pakistan, if i may call it that. what happened there in the last ten years or so had a huge impact on how taliban, the pakistani taliban came into being, how there was the genesis, how they established

their roots, how in a step-by-step fashion they expanded their space. that's why this area what i'll just now call kpb, that's why it is important. and i'll make about three or four points to focus on here. one is that one of the reasons why the genesis of or creation or mushrooming of tpp became a reality was that there was this government of all major religious political parties in kpp, this was from 2002 up to 2008 or 2007. this -- [inaudible] which believe in a democratic process, these are not the terrorist groups or like the let or ttp or other groups which believe in militancy. these are the groups which believe in a democratic process. they have been declared political agendas.

they have web sites. and one positive thing, if i may call that, was that this group of five different religious/political parties represented sunni groups,. [inaudible] more closer to the saudi vision and the shia group as well. so in principle it looked like a good combination with all the current religious political parties coming together. and this was the first opportunity this group had to run a province. but the results of that were, if i may call it, devastating. because that, the policies created a space. they were not directly supporting militancy or terrorism. not at all. but some of the orthodox, conservative, narrow-minded policies are looking the other way when they saw militant groups operating. that created the space for this new networking or connectivity between fatah and, if i may call

the militants who were in punjab. if you remember during the musharraf years, these militant groups were banned. so they all started moving from punjab, from the south of punjab where it was, they were more organized in that area to go to india, and then they were banned, pakistan military stopped any kind of connections with many of those groups. what they did, they started moving from punjab to kpp to fatah and then some of them moved on to afghanistan. this was the responsibility in the kpp province to stop them or go after them. pakistan had lacked capability to do that, to stop them, because the counterterrorism money, all the investment was made not in the civilian law enforcement or civilian intelligence agencies which could have really stop ised that. stopped that. so that's a large, i would say, failure or a gap that created, that provided this opportunity

for all the ttp activity. three other points. one is about saw bat. i think the pakistan military deserves credit for that, but i was just reading the latest figures of 2012, and it said there were about 17 major attacks from taliban groups that were repulsed. there were 105 different fire fights because some of the militants have gone into afghanistan. and this is a contentious issue. pakistan government is arguing some of the taliban are attacking pakistan from the other side. ..

>> a leading national army for become a very brave and courageous men who survived suicide attack and then he knew fully aware that taliban was after and. he was killed -- another econ who has taken up a stand. as important as it is -- it is as important to salute and to appreciate all these great and courageous people for standing up. another leader is standing it. but also some of the leading

police officers, and one of the leading, very well-known pakistan police officers in the audience, and i've reminded that three senior police officers were killed in peshawar. so also there is this that they've not been able to defend those brave people. and if these courageous people for standing up to taliban all one by one, then it can be. so these i think the important currents, i think finished my eight minutes or so, but i want just to focus on, just delete them with this idea there's a successful case but we don't know whether how far it can go. progressive political party was voted in because people, all the people of this province voted against. that was the alliance i

mentioned. so many people in pakistan have been doing the right thing. they have been voting in the good people. they have been voting out the problematic forces in a limited sense. but without good commitment, without education, the province will not be able to come out of the crisis. 768 schools bombed in the area. 58 schools bombed in this year, last year, 2012. i have not seen any major effort on the part of pakistan political government or military government to take up these major causes. unless pakistan, the status quo will not change. thank you. >> thank you. so, i'm going to focus on the

afghan taliban which is a completely different than the pakistan taliban. my chapter on time harwich is one i'm going to focus on really covers 2002 as a major predictor reason i did this is because i believe that the patterns did they really were locked in by 2004. you know, i went back, looked to the chapter and i was trying to think about what could be cleaned from that period of the relevant for today. i was surprised to see, in fact most of the dynamics that are taking place on the ground in 2002 and 2003 in kinston and in kandahar are completely relevant to what's happening today. what i see happening today is to key questions that we need to sort of grapple with. the first is what happens when the u.s. leaves, if the u.s. leaves. and the second is, do the

taliban want to negotiate? and for both of those questions i think the chapter in this book, you know, is very useful in this regard. there's a lot in the. i believe it's the longest chapter probably? yeah. but i'm only going to focus on those elements to speak directly to these two issues. and so after 2001, the taliban are routed and, you know, left in shame and defeat and the people of afghanistan welcomed that for the most part. and al qaeda, if you recall at the time, they fled to tora bora and then he went to pakistan, and at the time watching this from afar i assume that the taliban had essentially had the same position, that they were declaring jihad, the infidels where the foreign occupiers. it was only after peter asked me to study connor hart, connor hart insurgency, going to connor hart and trying to grapple with what's happening there that i came to a different conclusion

than what i had originally thought, and in short, that is that after 2001 the taliban quit. they quit wholesale. what i mean by that is the talibans, the people who do they constitute insurgency from the leadership and rank-and-file had quit and tried for the most part to cut, to engineer a series of deals with the afghan government. or in some cases with the americans directly. and it's interesting because i did that the quote, at the time, 2002, there were pakistani clerics, radical clerics trying to drum up support for the fallen talibans thing we need to send money to the taliban so they can fight the occupiers. but this is a quote from somebody who is a relative of omar, a very iraqi person in taliban. he said at the time, late 2001 after the government had fallen he said we want to tell the people of the taliban system is no more. they should not get any

donations in the the name of the taliban. if a stable islamic government is established we won't launch any action against. and on one level this didn't seem surprisingly but if you look at the broad history over the last 30 odd years, it's really not that surprising. what you see when to look at afghan history and the last two decades is a large number of factions that are fighting against each other that switch allegiances over the years, and they're driven by survival essential. so with the taliban particularly bit of power in 1994, starting in kandahar. what they did is they displace a lot of powerbrokers or warlords and they get these warlords an option in the south, essentially submit to us and surrender your weapons and sit at home and give up politics altogether and we will let you live, or if not we will fight you. so some of them fled to pakistan and some of them stayed in afghanistan and did what they were told.

talking to the taliban leadership, a lot of them expected the same thing in 2002-2003 period. so what you had in 2002-2004, specifically, you have more or less the entire leadership of the talibans, and i' i'm talking the minister of i'm talking the minister of interior, defense, information, justice, foreign affairs, key front-line commanders, key sort of advisors for little omar was the supreme leader of the taliban, cut deals with the afghan government. and in some cases attended to cut deals with the u.s. this calls for even the most ideological people in the taliban. one example is mullah who was in a ministry of justice and he's one of the ideologues for the most draconian policies for the taliban, the wielding police, people go around and check people. even he surrendered and cut the

people in 2000 do. oblong with him were thousands of foot soldiers. and so -- along with of them were thousands of foot soldiers. there was an opening there but, unfortunately, it didn't come to pass. this is what i think 2002-2004 are irrelevant for what's happening today because again, today the question is whether a broad political settlement is in the cards or not. but what the taliban leadership in 2002 and 2003 was a settlement was not developing. instead, every single deal that was engineered was some point overturned. i'll give an example. i mentioned the ideologue, one of the ideologues of the draconian ism that took place. he turned himself in in january 2002 to the governor of kandahar province. and they arranged a deal for tribal intermediaries. and the terms of the deal were

that he would give up any rights to political life producer whatever assets yet in terms of vehicles, et cetera. he would then retire to his home village. you publicly pledged support for the afghan government, the costly government and for the americans, and he would agree to be sort of monitored by the afghan government so they would have someone coming every week to the village. and he would try to -- now, news of this, he came to rumsfeld particularly, and rumsfeld was furious about this. you can go back and look at the archives and see what people in the administration were saying about this. the exception was there, we're making deal with terrorists and that's unacceptable. and so a lot of pressure was placed on the afghan government can take on the governor of kandahar who had engineered the deal.

so he went or his people went and said we are under a lot of pressure and we cannot guarantee your safety here in afghanistan so you should go to pakistan. and he fled to pakistan. is sort of, this instant, this gives a split up again and again in kandahar and around the country. another example which is particularly pertinent for today is -- a man who is a former interim minister under the taliban, also very important provincial governor, and he was also -- yet tribal links to karzai. after 2001 he had repudiated the taliban and he was seeking to find a way to join the afghan government, to join karzai essentially. and so he contacted hamid karzai's brother, and he wanted to engineer a deal. again, he was seeking a way to join the government. a meeting scheduled to take

place. the pakistanis caught wind of this and they were none too pleased with the idea of a taliban join the karzai government. and so they told the americans that he is in such and such a place. i believe they arrested him, handed them over to the americans, and now the americans sent him to guantánamo. you still in guantánamo today, and he's a particularly interesting case because a lot of sort of talks about talks or negotiations, making negotiations they're taking place, are about prisoner released from guantánamo. he's one of the five taliban prisoners the taliban is seeking to release. so these are just two examples but you can go across the board. the chapter goes into a lot more detail. as this is happening on the leadership level, we also had on the rank-and-file level night raids, the afghan government was

can has been implementing torture and human rights abuses. not just toward former taliban members but also towards people who the afghan government for whom the americans perceived as being a line to the taliban to do this would be plans or tried or committees in which taliban have traditionally drawn fruits from. for all these processes, again, there's some detail in the book, in the chapter on this, you've had since among people who either were once in the taliban or people who had been in communities from which the taliban was drawn but there was no space and political system in the post-2001 political system for the. and so these people were relocated to pakistan, and taliban was reconstituted essentially. and having talked to a lot of

these people who are in the process in 2002, 2003, what's striking to me is how relevant that seems to be today, and trying to understand whether the taliban are open to negotiations or not. so in my since there's broadly speaking to camps in the taliban. one is, one is people are mostly political. by political, i mean they are not front-line commanders began not on the ground in afghanistan leading fighters. rather, they are people like former ministers of education, ministers of culture, religious ideologues, or people who are in mullah omar's circle who recognize, and usually these are the same people who tried to reconcile in 2002, 2003. they recognize the taliban are not going to win this war, and i think, to me it's clear the taliban are not going to win this war and to recognize that. and, therefore, coming out of,

very practical need, there's an opening, or they have a sort of orientation trying to find negotiation. is 10 or 15 people today who are taliban leadership. there's a dozen people who are in abu dhabi and a couple people in turkey and as was people in pakistan right now your and so that to me constitutes one sort of click, very informally, a click of the taliban leadership. and a second grouping is what i think of is the military side. the military, people who are actually, they themselves may not be on the ground in afghanistan leading the fight, but they're the ones who were directing the urgency on the daily level. these are people who either for the most part distrust of the u.s. intention in negotiated settlement or in talking to some

of them they freakily pointed to 2002-2004 period as he look what happened last time we try to reconcile. and some of these people, by the way, are people who tried to cut deals with the americans in 2002, 2003 and were rebuffed. there's a sense among the people that we will just wait out the americans until 2014. and talking to them as well, there's a sense that they believe they can reconstitute the taliban. i think that's a fantasy but they believe that they're very close to that. if they jus just hold on for lie bit longer they can do that. and so, and i should say by the categories that i'm putting forth, you shouldn't -- just ways to try to understand the different positions that are right now the taliban. and talking to all of these people within the taliban and people around the taliban and also ordinary afghans, you know, there's a very heavy focus on troop numbers.

karzai has probably landed today in the u.s. and there will be talk of whether they'll be 6000 or 9000 or 2000 troops in afghanistan. and that's important, a lot of rural afghans in the villages where the wars are accepting thought say we want less trees. but there's another glitch i would like to raise with something i think in my discussion of the taliban they don't think about, nor would most of the people who would actually think about the things afghanistan, which is what we are facing today in afghanistan is a question of state formation. and this is summer to the questions we are facing in 2002-2004. that's what i think some o of te findings in the chapter are so useful. what i mean by that is i believe the u.s. has never seriously tempted to build the afghans depicted look at the 2002-2004 period, what happened is on the one hand they poured money expertise into the center, into kabul to karzai's government. but at the same time we have a

number of independent and unilateral agreements, people on the periphery. this would be for example, the governor of kandahar in 2002, or there's a series of private militias that were funded and supported. so while we were putting money into create the afghan police, we're also giving money to the government of connor hart for him to maintain his private militia. and there's a militia that doesn't answer to the afghan government anyway. you can create a state. if you think of the state and a very basic definition of the body that has a monopoly. there's a series of acts that exist around the country from 2002 today which include the permission of viable state. to give an example probably 100, maybe 200 military bases scattered, u.s. military bases

scattered around the country. each of those or most of those require afghan militiamen to guard. and these are not afghan police and these are not afghan army. these are irregular militiamen that we call private security contractors to guard. to supply each of these bases, we require a convoy that needs to be protected from attacks. that they would protect these convoys are again militiamen, warlords and strong and. each of them are either being paid directly by the u.s. military or they're being paid and directed by the department of defense through various subcontracting regimes. and there's been various estimates on how many of these people that are. if you include the private security contractors in kabul, maybe 60, 70,000 young men who have arms, who do not fall under the afghan government purview, whatsoever. and they all owe their existence entirely to foreign allegiance

to the question is what happens when the money stops flowing? along with them the afghans, the afghans say it doesn't collect its road is through taxation to again the question is what happens when the money stops flowing? we have one case that we can look to, which is in the '80s, very similar to what the soviets had. had militias around the country, flowed from moscow to kabul and outwards into the provinces. and it was a link, the russians left afghanistan in 1989, but the civil war started in 1992. it started in 19 and two because the money stops flowing. these are sort of the question i think we face and yo to control these questions out from the chapter.

>> my notes on the phone. thanks for much. i want to thank the american and peter, steve, for hosting this event. it's great to be on a panel with all these folks to all these folks and ago after a non--- to do what you read this is the point that peter made. when you read any of the chapters that anand has written. you really have to look at the references. and more so than with your average chapter. they are pretty incredible. so what i'd like to talk about is some of the semantics. my supertask in this effort was to step back and look at the bigger picture, and one of the things that came out of the process were originally pulling together these chapters, these chapters do hold up over time. as anand said, i think some of the basic dynamics are still there even as conditions have changed. some of the individuals and personalities have been killed and some of the political dynamics changed a bit but fundamentally you see the same issues.

and so semantically when we are pulling these together, there was this division we often made between so-called afghan taliban and pakistani taliban. and that's something that i thought at the time was sort of a false construct. it gave us, created a false distinction that obscured some of the cross polarization between these kind of groups, and didn't really shed a lot of light on the strategic differences between them. you see a new version of that even in the last couple of days where there's been reporting in our newspapers about a drone strike that killed a taliban commander in south waziristan. if you go to look at the headlines and you'll see it's often referred to as good taliban. versus bad taliban. the dissension there that gets

made is one around whether or not this is the taliban figure that attacks the pakistani. that is a really critical question, and it is quite important. but that sort of normative judgment also obscures a lot of complexity that we need to be considering when you think about these folks. after all, smart people in u.s. government decided that he wasn't all that good of a taliban, and wherever you sit on drone strikes there are smart people do think he deserved one. so what are the questions that we should be asking about these militant groups? i'm going to run the six we identified when these chapters were written and i think they still don't. the other thing that i would point out is that a slight tweak of these questions should be fused in all settings would have militants that are associated with al qaeda. the taliban is not al qaeda but they associate with al qaeda,

and i think that when we've got local groups that are associated with a transnational militant organization, there is an inversion of these questions need to be asked whether it's silly and north africa, yemen, and mali, whatever. and and so the better solution, six questions, the first one is the key strategic question that the good versus bad taliban different, which is definitely group attack pakistan. the reason why this is funny now is because it shapes the global environment and it fundamentally frames how they are going to be interacting with the organization that has a most are on the ground, which is to the pakistani military. if we look at, for example, this is somebody that did come over time generally have a more positive relationship with the pakistani government and other militants in the fatah. he came to power in 2004 only

after a previous drone strikes, just drone strikes killed his primary rival. at the time he was in a pakistani prison, which i did not stop at to put it, that allowed for a lot of negotiate with pakistani state figures been released and sort of took a leading role among them in south waziristan. so he was ended by a drone strike would anyways his leadership started with a drone strike as well. second question is what are the groups tribal and social roots, right? this is a key question because while we tend to look at complex in terms of how these organizations and have these networks face the united states, oftentimes that's not the most crucial question to the troops on the ground and sometimes it's very difficult to understand exactly what those histories are, but as these groups build

relationships, as they negotiate politics of the region, those are the questions that ask, what are my social roots, who can i trust, who cannot trust? and so if we're going to understand these organizations and develop policy, those are the questions we have to ask. the third, what are the militant groups relationship with foreign fighters? in the case of mona's ear, it really. and just ask what kind of coincide. he had a pretty good relationship with al qaeda, and i imagine that the target here is going to go check recently would point to that relationship over time. but he clashed repeatedly with uzbek militants of say with the i in you and the ij you. as a result he clashed with other taliban elements in south waziristan that allies. so when you look at somebody like his relationship with those other organizations we really

have to sort of get that define points about how he's claiming his policy. fourth, how gracefully do these folks target international troops in afghanistan? this is another key strategic question in the case, this is a pretty this book if you support attacks against u.s. troops afghanistan can work closely with the haqqani network overtime to do so. but that's not the case for every militant network in the fatah. there are criminal organizatio organizations. in areas that but other militant organizations. so this is the key question from a key question for u.s. policy going for. it's a key question for understanding how the pakistani state is going to look at these organizations. this is important to us. it's not as important to the isi, and how they're going to define their relationship with these organizations. does the militant group engage with the support it has on

western and civilian targets? the reason why this one is important is because it defines the relationship asserted with al qaeda and al qaeda'schoolboys mission and attack on civilians. he was never publicly implicated in a global attack, which distinguishes him from some of the other pakistan militants that were. he was, pointed to for a plot that would've taken place in barcelona, spain. wasn't, it was disrupted by the spanish police but that was a real interesting one where you did have a local pakistani militant looking to attack abroad in al qaeda style format. he was educated in that way, and this is total speculation but one of the question that i would ask of somebody like this comes with a had a long close relationship with the haqqani network, intervened on his behalf as his negotiating

relations with the pakistan in 2008. is whether or not some of these other militants engaged and support some of the haqqani network terrorist style attacks in the heart of kabul over the last couple of weeks. that's the kind of question that would change the way people thought about these kinds of organizations. and in the last one is does the group take operational direction from mullah omar was everyone rhetorically supports mullah omar, but i think one of the things that we need to be very careful, especially as researchers that don't have the kind of source network and access that anand as is to be very careful with what these guys say. and that goes for the taliban. but also goes for al qaeda, right? the heart of being a terrorist organization or an insurgent network that needs to create a